I recently got in a dumb internet fight about school reform. Maybe I’ll get into t here, maybe not. Because it really was dumb. It started because the other guy implied I was a dummy because I’m critical of a lot of the so-called school reform movement. Not me pesonally. Anyone who critiques “school reform.” Which, fine, whatever. That’s the internet for you. I shouldn’t take it personally. I tried to be too cute with my calling him out and I got called out myself. My fault.

The thing is, I’m am school reform advocate. I truly want to improve and change schools. I spend every day trying to teach students how to teach better. I want schools to improve. I think the status quo kind of sucks.

However, I’m also critical of the school reform movement because I’m on the ground seeing the proposals being pushed. Things like charging student teachers $1,000 to pretend to teach in some phony Second Life to see if they should be eligile for certification. You cannot tell me that is about improving schools. You cannot tell me that is about accountability. That’s about one thing: charging $1000 to a captive audience.

But if I critique that proposal? I’m simple. I want students to graduate high school without being able to read. I’m for the status quo. I’m a union shill. I’m anti-reform. Which is nonsense, but that’s how this “debate” is being framed.

Like so many issues right now, nothing will change until we can actually listen to what our opponents are saying. If we just throw straw men at each other it’s a waste of time. I’m tired of wasting my time.

We need a nationally recognized system of employee evauations to ensure that the correct people are getting raises and promotions. In the current system each firm is able to set their own requirements and expectations for employees. Sometimes it varries from department to department or even boss to boss! This ineffective and inefficient system is costing Americans billions in lost productivity. The best solution is to measure employee evaluations at different firms, judge them, rank them, and develop a national set of standards for all firms.

Probably sounds crazy, right? That's because it is. But that's exactly what groups like NCTQ say about teachers.

As it stands right now there are 58 readings in my syllabus for Foundations of Education. That seems like a lot for a freshman-level course, but I can't find anything that should be cut. I'll have to reevaluate around spring break and see if I am overwhelming the students. I think they can handle it, but I also want to be mindful that many of them work or have obligations at home.

It's not uncommon at all to hear practicing teachers reminisce about their time in their education program and complain about writing lesson plans. "The lesson plans I write now are nothing like the plans I wrote in college!" they say. And it's a fair point. The lesson plans my students write are pages long. In their careers they'll be a paragraph or two, or maybe even a bullet point.

The implication is that us teaching in ed. schools are wasting our students' times by having them write out these detailed lesson plans. The implication is that we are giving students busywork. The implication is that ed. schools are disconnected from classroom teaching.

I respectfully disagree. For me the long lesson plans I require are a form of practice. Think about it like practice for soccer or tennis. In soccer practice a student-athlete might find herself running laps around the field. We know this is not how soccer is played; I've never seen a player simply circle the field during a game. In tennis practice she might find herself serving ball after ball into an empty court. While it would be nice to serve nothing but aces, we understand that some balls will be returned and she'll have to play a volley or two. Are coaches wasting these athlete's time with busywork?

Of course not. They're building conditioning and muscle memory. That's what the long lesson plans are all about. I want my students to think about and explain every aspect of their lesson, so later these things are second-nature.

I don't make fun of Millennials, but I will make fun of the kids skateboarding down the street. I'm okay with that.

There is a difference between being annoyed with a generation and being annoyed with an age group. "Kids today..." implies there is something wrong with this specific generation of young people. "Kids..." is admitting that we're all dumb when we're teenagers.

Frustration with "Millennials" is about putting your generation above them. Saying that you were better in some way whe you were 17, 22, or 26. Frustration with young people is about wanting to get in the Deloreian and speak to yourself at 17, 22, or 26 and say "Stop! One day you'll be 36 and look back and cringe!"

One stems from arrogance and one stems from shame. When I give a student a hard time about missing homework it's not because I think he is entitled. It's because I wish I had just done my homework when I was 18.

This current generation of young people has it hard enough without us describing them as somehow the worst generation in history.

These days the Internet Rage Machine swings into overdrive at the drop of a hat. Everyone uses almost every excuse to get angry about whatever they can. Because rage drives traffic, and traffic can drive revenue when you run a web site that's dependent on page impressions and unique visits to generate traffic for advertisers. For some people, it's all about going viral and getting eyes on your pages.

There are very real reasons to turn on the Internet Rage Machine. There are real problems in the world and sometimes lots of people yelling via Twitter is the only way to get attention. But time and attention are limited resources, and I cannot understand wasting them on something as trivial as an Bono and The Edge.

In the end I decided to stick with a more traditional grading system for this semester. I couldn't come up with a reason for using badges besides "they're hot right now." Since this is a class for first-year students it made more sense to familiarize them with the typical college grading system. Maybe in the spring I'll get more exciting.

However, this class--Current Topics in American Ed--will be blogging throughout the semester. You can read the posts at CurrentTopicsAFC.org.

A week before the first paper was due, a young woman in my class raised her hand and asked where the rubric was.

Shamefaced and stuttering, I had to admit that I had no idea what a rubric was. She helpfully explained that this was a set of guidelines explaining what I expected them to write, how I expected them to write it, and how each aspect of the paper would be evaluated. A set of boxes that students could check off to guarantee that they had met my expectations. For all intents and purposes, in other words, an outline for the paper.

Except a rubric isn't an outline for the paper. Not really. A rubric--or maybe I should say a good rubric--is a set of expectations for an assignment.

When we give an assignment we have a mental model of what a good paper looks like. We also know what excellent and crappy papers look like. A rubric simply takes our mental models and puts them on paper so they can be shared with students.

Yes, you're telling the students what an "A" paper looks like. But your exceptations already existed before you made the rubric. It seems unfair to penalize a student because they failed to read your mind.

Are rubrics perfect tools? Of course not. Can they be overwritten and limiting? I guess so.

However, we've probablty all had the experience of saying "I have no idea what this teacher/professor wants" when working on an assignment. I simply can't understand how that experience enhances student learning.

(p.s. My favorite variation of bad rubric is just a bunch of generic nonsense like "paper is proper length" that wastes everyone's time.)

It seems in an effort to fight grade inflation, colleges and universities have placed limits on the amount of A's students can receive in a course. It hasn't gone well:

A number of colleges and universities adopted policies designed to curb grade inflation. But one of the most prominent of those institutions -- Princeton University -- now appears poised to roll back the most controversial part of its policy: a limit of 35 percent on the A-range grades awarded in each course. A faculty report released Thursday made that recommendation, and it was endorsed by the university's president.

I've never understood the impulse to limit the amount of A's and B's that can be received in a course. Maybe it is because I was trained in a standards-based system, where grades served as signals of how much students learned during the course. It was simple, if all students met my expectations, then they all earned B's. Students that went beyond the goals of the class earned A's.

Normative grading -- where average grades become C's and students are sorted around the mean -- limits the amount of A's available for the course. Rather than measuring how much students learned, you're now measuring how much students learned compared to other students in the course.

Among other things, this means grades are now difficult to compare over time, because each semester will contain a different mix of students. The same student doing the same work in semester X could get a different grade compared to semester Y.

In addition, students are now incentivized to fight for grades. Any sense of cooperation goes out the window. Why form study groups when you’d just be helping your opponent do better in class?

Can you see how this would be a problem? As the article notes, the students at Princeton did:

The faculty report at Princeton noted the unpopularity of the current policy with students. The 35 percent targets for A-range grades "are too often misinterpreted as quotas. They add a large element of stress to students’ lives, making them feel as though they are competing for a limited resource of A grades," the report says.

Rather than focusing on the content, students were looking at their peers. Students stressing out because a class is difficult is perfectly fair. Students stressing because they have to meet a moving target based on peer performance? Not so fair.

This year I'll be teaching a course in social studies curriculum and instruction for the first time. As the department's "social studies guy," I'm very much looking forward to the experience. However, I'm wondering where the balance should be between teaching methods and content.

The course's foundational concept is simply:

Social studies is not history.

At our school students getting certified in social studies are history majors. There's nothing wrong with that, but I worry that it gives the impression that all a social studies teacher needs is history content knowledge. Sociology, political science, anthropology, and economics are all included in the NJ standards (and Praxis exam), but they can sometimes seem unimportant when compared to history. Part of my goal with this class is to show the students how a good teacher can incorporate these other perspectives.

Part of this will involve teaching content in the areas outside of history. What I'm working on now is deciding how to work these areas into a course that is designed to cover lesson planning.

In her article Why do Americans Stink at Math, Elizabeth Green contrasts the American and Japanese styles of teaching mathematics in public schools. Here is one example:

By 1995, when American researchers videotaped eighth-grade classrooms in the United States and Japan, Japanese schools had overwhelmingly traded the old “I, We, You” script for “You, Y’all, We.” (American schools, meanwhile didn’t look much different than they did before the reforms.) Japanese students had changed too. Participating in class, they spoke more often than Americans and had more to say. In fact, when Takahashi came to Chicago initially, the first thing he noticed was how uncomfortably silent all the classrooms were. One teacher must have said, “Shh!” a hundred times, he said. Later, when he took American visitors on tours of Japanese schools, he had to warn them about the noise from children talking, arguing, shrieking about the best way to solve problems. The research showed that Japanese students initiated the method for solving a problem in 40 percent of the lessons; Americans initiated 9 percent of the time. Similarly, 96 percent of American students’ work fell into the category of “practice,” while Japanese students spent only 41 percent of their time practicing. Almost half of Japanese students’ time was spent doing work that the researchers termed “invent/think.” (American students spent less than 1 percent of their time on it.) Even the equipment in classrooms reflected the focus on getting students to think. Whereas American teachers all used overhead projectors, allowing them to focus students’ attention on the teacher’s rules and equations, rather than their own, in Japan, the preferred device was a blackboard, allowing students to track the evolution of everyone’s ideas.

It is implied that Japan's relative success on the PISA exam is due to a more participatory and constructivist pedagogy, and this may be true. However, no mention is made of private tutoring as a possible source of Japan's success. This is a major pet peeve of mine. We simply have no idea how much of Japan's (or South Korea's, or Shanghai's) success on international exams are due to classroom practices, or how much to attribute to the Juku (or Hagwon, or Buxiban) system.

It is difficult--if not impossible--to disaggregate the contributions of public education in systems with high levels of private tutoring, yet articles in the popular press consistently make little or no mention of the hours students spend after school in cram school. Instead the focus is made on polices and practices of the public education system. Why?

While I believe the practices describe by Green are more effective, and that is the style of math teaching I teach my students. However, the answer to the titular question could just as easily be "because they spend hours in private tutoring academies."

The short answer is this is a simple blog written by me, Mike Russell.

What kinds of things will be posted here?

This blog will serve as home to a few different types of content:

Thoughts about education and ed reform that are too long for twitter. Ed reform is a huge, complicated topic and sometimes debates on twitter lose the nuance needed when discussing huge, complicated topics. So I'm going to do that here instead of strings of tweets.

Little chunks of research. Parts of my dissertation or articles in progress, or maybe bits of research that will one day become publications. I'm not quite sure.

Workflow posts. I find talking (or writing) about my workflow helps me think about and refine my workflow, so I'll be doing some of that here. It's a stereotypical topic for a grad student, but it's also useful. Hopefully someone will read what I'm doing and get some ideas of their own (or comment and tell me what I'm doing wrong.)

Thoughts on teaching. This fall I'm teaching four courses: an intro to education class, a basic ed theory course, a "how to write a lesson plan" class, and a social studies curriculum and instruction course. I plan on trying some new idea I gathered from THATCamp Digital Pedagogy this summer and I'll blog about how that goes here.

What will not be posted here?

Rants about students. Teachers shouldn't downtalk their students. That's something I teach and something I believe. I think the "millennials" have gotten a bad rap (yes, really) and I'm not going to waste time complaining about texting in class or whatever.

Why the "Secondary Generalist" name?

My first job title as a teacher was secondary generalist. I was hired to teach high school. As in I was the only high school teacher for all subjects for freshmen through super-seniors. It was great.

I've liked the idea of being a generalist ever since. It's not a good trait for a grad student (we're supposed to hyper-focus on a topic, after all), but it seems to work for me. In my current position I work with secondary students so the title still kind of works.